Validity and Necessity

In this paper I argue against the commonly received view that Kripke’s formal Possible World Semantics (PWS) reflects the adoption of a metaphysical interpretation of the modal operators. I consider in detail Kripke’s three main innovations vis-à-vis Carnap’s PWS: a new view of the worlds, variable domains of quantification, and the adoption of a notion of universal validity. I argue that all these changes are driven by the natural technical development of the model theory and its related notion of validity: they are dictated by merely formal considerations, not interpretive concerns. I conclude that Kripke’s model theoretic semantics does not induce a metaphysical reading of necessity, and is formally adequate independently of the specific interpretation of the modal operators.